John Fleming and Myall Creek killings
Category: Mob Fury 25th July 2026
Honestly this is a story that sits in my brain like a splinter, annoying and stubborn, because it smells of livestock dust and law books and people trying to pretend brutality was ordinary. On 10 June 1838 a group of colonists attacked an Aboriginal camp at Myall Creek station in New South Wales and murdered about twenty eight Wirrayaraay people, including women and children. The ringleader recorded in contemporary papers was John Henry Fleming, a name that clung to headlines like a stain.
The violence was vicious and almost performative. Witness accounts and depositions show it was planned, which makes the whole thing extra ick. Eleven men were arrested after a public outcry. The first trial ended in acquittals and the crowd breathed easy, which in retrospect reads like a practical red flag moment. Then the case was retried, seven men were convicted of murder, and they were publicly hanged in December that year. For some colonists this was a legal shock. For others it was scandalous, and that reaction gave the story terrible clout in papers and pubs.
What makes my brain do that weird silence thing is the way some participants vanished from the record. John Henry Fleming, the leader, managed to disappear from the justice system in certain official ways. He was effectively ghosted by punishment while others paid the ultimate price. That split felt, and still feels, wildly unjust. Sheesh.
This case forced a public conversation no one wanted to have. It exposed how colonial rage, cheap guap motives and racial contempt could turn a Sunday morning into a slaughter. Then the law tried to sort it, which was awkward, messy and historically dank in the sense that it was rare to see colonists prosecuted for killing Indigenous people.
I know this reads like a grim true crime feed, but there are moments that land like sharp, absurd jokes: newspapers treating the hangings like theatre, neighbours gossiping about lost sheep while bodies lay counted, the whole settler performance of being civilized. It is sending me and it should live rent free in our heads as an ugly example of what happens when mob violence gets cozy and the law picks favorites.